This paper examines three sources of the fluctuations in real interest rates during the past three decades: changes in budget deficits, changes in tax rules, and changes in monetary policy. The evidence indicates that budget deficits and monetary policy have had a strong influence on the level...

Since the spring of 1990, the rates of growth of real income, of nominal income, and of the broad monetary aggregate (M2) have been substantially less than the Federal Reserve had set as targets and than most observers regarded as appropriate. The breakdown of the traditional economic relations...

This paper explores how unfunded pension obligations affect the market values of firms. Finns appear to choose the interest rate they use in discounting future benefit obligations so as to balance the tax advantages of a low rate against the more healthy looking annual reports a high rate...

This paper presents new estimates of the taxes paid on nonfinancial corporate capital, on the pretax rate of return to capital, and on the effective tax rate. The basic time series show that both the pretax rate of return and the effective tax rate have varied substantially in the past quarter...

Although the return to capital is a focus of research in both macroeconomics and public finance, each specialty has approached this subject with an almost total disregard for the other's contribution. Macroeconomic studies of the effect of inflation on the rate of interest have implicitly...

Although there is now widespread agreement in the economics profession that discretionary counter-cyclical'fiscal policy has not contributed to economic stability and may have actually been destabilizing at particular times in the past, there is one important condition when discretionary fiscal...

This paper analyzes the ways in which substituting a consumption tax for the existing personal and corporate income taxes would affect equilibrium pretax interest rates. The analysis indicates that whether the pretax rate of interest rises or falls depends on the strength of the personal saving...

The creation of the euro and the European Central Bank is a remarkable and unprecedented event in economic and political history: creating a supranational central bank and leaving eleven countries without national currencies of their own. The experience of the first year confirms that one size...

This paper illustrates the importance of the fiscal framework for monetary analysis by discussing three separate issues. I begin by examining how the fiscal framework changes the macroeconomic equilibrium associated with different steady state rates of money growth. This includes a summary of...

This paper discusses the effects of the interaction between inflation and the taxation of capital income. The principal conclusions are: (1) Inflation substantially increases the total effective tax rate on the income from capital used in the nonfinancial corporate sector. The total effective...